Nature on the Attack

In
a
recent issue of Nature (Volume 442, pp. 230-231, 20 July 2006),
Eugenie Samuel Reich
reports
S. Putterman's belief that Rusi Taleyarkhan,
leader of the group that
developed the bubble
fusion
process, used
DARPA
funding for a particular experiment published in Physical Review
Letters,
implying, the article appears to suggest, 'misuse of
federal dollars', a serious allegation. The five points
listed by Nature in support of this position
are
consistent with a not
unreasonable alternative to Putterman's view (see below),
where
the question of misuse of funds simply does not arise.
This
supports Taleyarkhan's assertion (quoted in the article), that
Putterman's
interpretation of how the work was funded is "off-base
and
wrong".

Interestingly enough, Putterman has
indicated (private communication) that he does not consider there has
been any misuse of funds; and neither, to the best of my knowledge, is
there any indication
that either DARPA or Purdue have ever considered that
this might have occurred.

Thus it seems that prior to the Nature article, while the research itself
had come in for criticism in some quarters, there had never been any suggestion
that research funds could have been misused.
In the absence of any clear grounds on which such an allegation could have been supported,
the Nature article did not state explicitly that funding
misuse had taken place either, but its juxtaposition of the otherwise mysterious reference
to misuse of federal dollars, and a box headed 'Where did the money go?',
suggests nevertheless a clear intent to create in the reader's mind an impression
that there had indeed been misuse of funds.

With this latest episode, Nature's
interest in finding points
with which to attack Taleyarkhan (this is
by no means the first hostile article
there has been in the journal) has far outstepped the bounds of credible journalism.
Asked to provide justification for the
serious
allegations implicitly engineered in the article, the journal has come up so far
only with the following non-response (further correspondence with the journal can be found here: link 1, link 2):

"We stand by [our article]
and
believe it was a fair account of the matter and a worthwhile story
to
run -- the fate of $250,000 of public money is clearly in the
public
interest".

As yet,
there has been no retraction of the implicit allegation of funding misuse; seemingly, Nature's
attitude is:
"if it's a good story, who cares if there are problems with
the details?". It is unusual, to say the least,
for a journal such as
Nature to take such a cavalier attitude to such
matters.

Putterman's flawed "case"

The following is the
text of the published allegation
and its inadequate support. The
facts listed by Nature (see the following), in an accusatory box headed
"Where did the money go?", do show
that some people who have at some
time
worked on the PRL experiment (Taleyarkhan, Cho, Xu) have also at some time received DARPA funding.
That would be unproblematic, and not at all the same as
what Nature
appears to want the reader to infer from the listed facts, viz.
DARPA
funding being illegitimately used for the PRL experiment.
Note also (in
regard to item 4 of the list)
that more than one experiment was
demonstrated to the programme manager on the occasion alluded to in that
item.

The
DARPA grant awarded to Seth Putterman and Rusi Taleyarkhan for work
on bubble fusion began in March 2005, and Taleyarkhan submitted a paper to
Physical Review Letters (PRL) that September. Taleyarkhan
insists no DARPA
money was used for that work, but after checking
accounts at Purdue
University, where Taleyarkhan is based, Putterman
believes otherwise
(Nature's list of supposedly supportive points,
inadequate for the
reasons indicated above, follows):

According to Purdue's accounts, the DARPA grant was
billed for
one-third of Taleyarkhan's salary from March until May 2005,
all of
it from June to August, and one-fifth of it from September to
December.

At
least
$25,000 of the grant money was transferred to Taleyarkhan's
former
collaborator JaeSeon Cho at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee.
The PRL paper thanks Cho for his "in-depth advice
and ongoing technical
assistance and cross-checks".

Taleyarkhan's
postdoc, Yiban Xu, was a co-author on
the PRL paper. The DARPA grant
paid all of his salary for March and April
2005, and at least half
of it from May until December. (Xu's salary was
originally billed at
100% for part of this latter period, but a partial
refund was made
in March 2006.)

The
experiment described in the PRL paper is the same
as the one
Taleyarkhan demonstrated to his DARPA programme manager,
William
Coblenz, at a meeting on 1 March 2006 to assess progress of the
DARPA-funded work.

None
of Taleyarkhan's other
grants, according to a list provided by
Purdue University, includes the
word 'sonofusion' in the
title.